This is one country crying out for "regime change". But what do we in the west do? Invade Iraq. Bring "democracy" to the middle east. Why not North Korea?

The Americans seem to have been scared off jungle fighting after Vietnam and now they only want to fight in deserts where their enemies have nowhere to hide. Americans are cowards and cant bear to do anything that may put themselves at risk. Hence their cowardly use of remote vehicles. Posturing, macho wargames are all they can bring themselves to do to (pointlessly) pressure the North Koreans, who must be laughing maniacally as the septic fools give them the justification for their inflated military spending and starving of their own people.

South Korea spends over 3 times the amount on its military per year compared to the North but in $ per $1000 of GPD the North spends 10 times as much.

It has about the same population of Australia but Australia spends three times as much on its own military.

I'm not sure of the 'shiny new war machine' that Shadow Minister talks about.

If the US is the main instigator of tension in the North and South Korea is more than capable of looking after itself then why not withdraw?

It still has a huge contingent in Japan able to respond very quickly to any threat but do they really need to be on the doorstep?

Late Night Live's latest show talked about North Korea far more resembling a nationalist state than a communist one with similar leadership worship afflictions to that of Germany during Hitler's reign.

I too would like to see regime change in North Korea but these ends do not justify the means.

Regarding the famine that is understood to have claimed nearly 2 million lives in the mid 90s;

From Wikipedia.

“In June 1995 an agreement was reached that the two countries would act jointly. South Korea would provide 150,000 MT of grain in unmarked bags, and Japan would provide 150,000 MT gratis and another 150,000 MT on concessional terms. In October 1995 and January 1996, North Korea again approached Japan for assistance. On these two occasions, both of which came at crucial moments in the evolution of the famine, opposition from both South Korea and domestic political sources quashed the deals."

“Beginning in 1997, the U.S. began shipping food aid to North Korea through the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to combat the famine. Shipments peaked in 1999 at nearly 700,000 tons making the U.S. the largest foreign aid donor to the country at the time. Under the Bush Administration, aid was drastically reduced year after year from 350,000 tons in 2001 to 40,000 in 2004.”

Let common sense and humanity prevail.

Shadow Minister,

Sure, heres a few references -

Here's one on the Oil situation-
http://www.oilcrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm

One (internal) one about grain crops-
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20070419_Gaidar.pdf

Plus another on Reagan's individual relevance-
http://hnn.us/articles/2732.html

It was a very complex situation and a bit simplistic to give all the credit to the actions of a single politician.

Nevertheless it's interesting to see that for a hopelessly failed economy it produced - almost overnight - more billionaires per capita than any other country in the world. Hints a bit about internal corruption doesn't it?

Wobbles,

Did you actually read your own links?

They reinforce that:
The collapse was economic,
The Reagan build up sparked a corresponding massive build up and expenditure in the USSR in the 80s

That the oil price collapse and the need to import wheat also contributed does not diminish the huge drain the military imposed on the economy, without which the collapse might have still come, but decades later.

The one post http://hnn.us/articles/2732.html

Claims that the point of Reagan's build up was to cause the Soviets to collapse because they could not compete was a failure, that Reagan's objectives were missed, as the Soviets matched the US build up.

I agree that right up to the point of collapse, the USSR could have provided a serious match to the US, however, that was completely beside the point.

I absolutely agree with the OP but also do realise that there's evidently some concerted plan being followed to break NK. One can only hope that the people running things know what they're doing and it will end with a fizzle rather than a bang. The cost either way in lives lost will be fantastic in scale.

The problem is that I very much doubt NK's leadership will in the final crunch just lie down and give up - they will almost certainly launch all out war with whatever they have available at the time which will not be pretty in anyone's language...

And moving onto some really scary ideas even if somewhat left of field: one interpretation of Nostradamus' predictions is that he indicates toward the end of the 20th century and into the beginning of the 21st that there will be a spate of natural disasters, a series of small wars, - and finally a huge famine which will cause the third "anticrist" to rise in the East and trigger armageddon... (in there somewhere there's reference to the "twin brothers" falling or something similar too from memory).